picasa

Back from my mini-trip down to Southern California for the weekend and I certainly made heavy use of my phone while down there. One of the main ways was as my surrogate camera. I made the conscious decision to leave behind my Canon for this trip and see what it would be like to rely solely on the Palm Pre for any photo opportunities.

I have to say, that it performed admirably at this task. One thing I did run into was that I started getting tired of lightly smudging my screen with my fingers having to press the touch … Read more

Google thinks it has made a breakthrough in "computer vision."

Imagine stumbling upon a picture of a beautiful site in Europe filled with ancient ruins, one you didn't recognize at first glance while searching for vacation destinations online. Google has developed a way to let a person provide Google with the URL for that image and search a database of over 40 million geotagged photos to match that image to verified landmarks, giving you a destination for that next trip.

The project is still very much in the research stage, said Jay Yagnik, Google's head of … Read more

BumpTop replaces your desktop with a visual environment unlike any you've used. It's a bit like a futuristic gesture-based interface, but it's tied to your mouse. Were it capable of simultaneous Web browsing, its utility would be much more apparent.

BumpTop makes the items on your computer's desktop more like their real-world counterparts. Icons and folders are assigned a virtual weight based on the amount of memory they take up and their importance to you. You can move them by click-and-drag, or fling them across the BumpTop space. The program determines their importance based on how … Read more

Google loves its April Fools' jokes, and this year a prank emerged in the form of CADIE--an artificial-intelligence research project with a cute panda avatar--taking over the search giant.

"We're pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions," according to a CADIE description accompanying the faux announcement.

The site pointed to CADIE's YouTube channel and CADIE's blog.

Among CADIE's abilities: • Gmail Autopilot, which answers your e-mail for you. •  Chrome updated for use with red-and-blue 3D glasses (… Read more

Gmail has four new items in its labs section, all of which enhance the links people have included in their messages. You're now able to flip on support for Yelp, Flickr, Picasa Web albums, and YouTube. Doing so will turn a link from one of those sites into a full-quality preview of the content you'd find on that site.

For instance, if someone has included a YouTube link, it simply shows up at the bottom of a message, just as if they had included it as an attachment. (You are less likely to get Rickrolled, that way.) The … Read more

Google has begun showing ads on search results at its Picasa site for sharing photos, part of its gradual expansion of advertising across its numerous Web properties.

Pages for photos and galleries doesn't show ads, but search results do for some people. The ads are located in a yellow-tinted "sponsored links" section above the photo results for some in the United States. (See screenshot below.)

"As part of our ongoing commitment to innovation, and to help users find new and better ways of getting the information they're looking for, we are currently showing text ads … Read more

Video site Hulu announced on Monday that it will stream President Barack Obama's first formal press conference Monday night at 5 p.m. PST. According to the company, the live stream will run until its conclusion and then it will be made available for streaming on the site thereafter.

Blogger Brandon Kraft says he found a new feature in the Google Apps version of Google Calendar. According to Kraft, users can now attach files from Google Docs and photos from Google's Picasa to any event in the calendar. Google has yet to comment on the find.

I'm a somewhat dissatisfied owner of a new MacBook. One of the things I was looking forward to with the computer was the vaunted easy photo management I kept hearing about. But I found the Mac's free photo management app, iPhoto, frustrating to use, compared to the product I had become accustomed to on Windows: Google's Picasa. I didn't like the fact that I had to manually import photos into the product--even photos already on my Mac--and that the import process made duplicates of my photos when I did so. I much prefer Picasa, which simply … Read more